Sound accelerator: Sonic Revolutions

Friday, 6/27/2025 – Sunday, 7/13/2025

Event location
München

Public event

Target audience
students, employees, publically, specialist audience

With the Heaven’s Carousel, composer and conceptual artist Tim Otto Roth has developed an expansive kinetic instrument: 36 spherical, illuminated loudspeakers rotate like celestial bodies in three wide orbits above the audience. After presentations for instance in Rome, Baltimore and Karlsruhe, Roth expands for the “Sonic Revolutions” his microtonal combinatoric repertoire with specially developed overtone compositions: sounds — among others from instrumental music — are broken down into their partials and recomposed by playing the individual overtones across the 36 loudspeakers.

Heaven’s Carousel

The Heaven's Carousel revolves from 27 June to 13 July 2025 every evening, starting at sunset. The compositions will vary during the runtime: Roth has developed a programme for the Kunstareal festival from 27 to 29 June under the motto ‘The scales are free’, which explores moments of freedom in music. To round off the presentation on the final weekend, a late string quartet by Ludwig van Beethoven will be confronted with the new recomposition technique: “Beethoven meets Fourier” promises a hitherto unheard-of sound experience.

International Symposium

180 years after the experimental acoustic validation of the Doppler effect with trumpeters on a steam locomotive, the interplay of space, time and the composition of sound continues to occupy the arts and research. Alongside the presentation of ‘Sonic Revolutions’, Prof. Bernhard Seeber and Dr Tim Otto Roth invite you to a transdisciplinary symposium on 4 and 5 July, at which international experts from the field of acoustics will explore the phenomenon of moving sound with cultural scientists and artists. The symposium will be held in English and will also be broadcast on Zoom. The significance of space and movement for sound art will be explored in a public debate (in German) on 4 July at 8pm.

“Sonic Revolutions” are a collaboration project between Tim Otto Roth, the Professorship of Audio Information Processing, Prof. Bernhard Seeber, and the TUM Center for Culture and Arts. The project is funded by TUM University Foundation, DFG, Aventis Foundation and Sparkassenstiftung. The symposium is additionally financed by the professorship of Audio Information Processing.